Standing ironically and other book related notes

[momsalive1]

I read the fantasy books I got for Christmas, all first in a series. I am impatiently waiting for the sequel of "The Name of the Wind" (Patrick Rothfuss) to get into paperback so I can feel justified in buying it and for the third in the CS Friedman Magister and the NK Jemisin Hundred Thousand Kingdom series to be published this fall. I liked them so much I re-read the first books before picking up the second. Luckily the Stephen Donaldson "Thomas Covenent" books are older so I plow right through them. The one I didn't go for the second book on was "The Belgariad" (David Eddings) because the writing annoyed me too much: after the third or fourth time he described someone "standing ironically" I knew there was no hope for me and Mr. Eddings.


I just finished my third non-fiction book in a row and that's more non-fiction than I have read in years. I like my reading to take me someplace else, and I forgot that non-fiction can do that, too.

The best of the three was "Moby-Duck" by Donovan Hohn, mainly because he writes beautifully, but also because he makes the story so interesting, and manages to weave a lot of thoughts about Life in with his subject.  He got hooked by the story about 28,8000 bath toys that went overboard off a container ship, and once he found out there was very little known about them other than those basic facts, decided to trace their path from China, where they were made, to the East Coast of the US, where they had been reported.  This gives him an excuse to find out about ocean garbage patches, super sized container shipping, really big waves, and a lot of other things that, in his hands, are very intriguing. 

The one I just finished is "Incognito" by David Eagleman. His mission is to explain who it is you are arguing with when you argue with yourself. This other self is most of what the brain does, all without your conscious input or even awareness. We think we see (or otherwise sense) the whole of reality, but evidently we take in little of the available information in our environment, reducing it from its all glory to a personal, situation specific and tiny slice of reality - only the minimum the brain thinks it needs to do its work. Ask someone to look at a painting of a group of people in a room, and decide who is the wealthiest, and their eyes track a particular path. Ask what the people are doing and you get another track, ask what they are feeling and you get a completely different path. You - your consciousness - thinks you see the whole picture but you don't. Once the information gets inside your head, it is modified to meet internal expectations (you can't see your eyes move in the mirror - your brain alters the image coming in to keep it steady), biases and other subroutines in your software (how to process and evaluate social hierarchies, for example) before finally raising the image (or thought, or other sensory input) to your conscious awareness. He talks about these subroutines as a "team of rivals" that work over a situation from different, often conflicting viewpoints - you just get the final executive summary of the viewpoint that won.

My daughter gave me "Unbowed" by Wangari Maathai. She is the first African woman, and the first environmentalist, to win the Nobel Peace Prize. I don't like biographies usually and this didn't change my mind, but it was a pretty gripping story of what happened to her when she tried to improve the lot of her fellow Kenyans in ways that angered those in control of the country.

Comments

[nutmeg3.livejournal.com]

Those first two non-fiction books sound fascinating! And have you read the Locke Lamora books? Or Acacia? Both series have two books out so far.

[momsalive1]

No! Once I get done with these I will give them a try. There are so many scifi and fantasy series!!!!

[lanyn.livejournal.com]

You brought back this really old memory of this small jigsaw puzzle I had that was a picture of Moby Duck. It was a rubber ducky on the high seas, waves tossing it, the whaling ship in the background, and a boat full of whalers in the front of the picture, trying to hunt Moby Duck. I loved that puzzle cuz the picture always cracked me up.

And yay for lots of reading!